We have been using laptops with Windows (3.1, 3.5, 98, 98SE, ME, and XP) for
the past fourteen years, frequently with extended periods of being "out of
touch" with the Internet for several months (in fact, we have just arrived
at an Internet hotspot after cruising the southern Baja away from "all
civilization" for a month). No problems with the operating system,
authenticating, winlink email, charting, or anything else. And we don't
usually leave the laptop on, but we did leave it on continuosly for a 35
hour passage to Mazatlan without any problems. And yes it does "go to sleep"
but boots back up quickly when we poke at it. We have never had a
debilitating computer problem on board in all those years, software or
hardware; we use off-the-shelf so-so laptops with a DC-to-DC converter, but
many laptops can also run off 12 volts, they just can't charge their
batteries... Our older laptop stays on board, stuck to the nav desk with
"velcro from hell" (a 3M product) and the newer one does mobile duty going
ashore. When we get a new laptop, the desk unit is swapped or traded, the
once-mobile unit gets stuck to the desk, and the newest one becomes the
mobile unit.
Lobbing a comment in from left field - the charts here are derived from data
as old as 1860 and can be pretty "iffy". If one tried to combine the charts
with radar, one would get a pretty good headache from trying to sort out the
differences. As a result, combined or integrated systems here are useless.
So we use our laptop with its raster chart capabilities to get us to the
neighborhood of where we want to be, then use the radar, depthsounder, and
low-tech eyeball for getting us into an anchorage.(Also handy to have a
paper chart in the cockpit.) AIS would work here because all vessels here
are being plotted on the latest datum, giving accurate relative distances
and directions, even if sometimes the position would plot on the side of a
mountain...
Michael and Elizabeth
S/V Cambria
Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico

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Received on Sat Mar 10 13:21:04 2007